Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

I looked, shuddered, shuffled my feet uncertainly, and brought my staring eyes back to the precarious footing. "Push on!" I implored quaveringly; "my head's beginning to swim as it is."

The roar of violently falling water came to my ears as we rounded the bend at the lower end of the steep incline, and just ahead was the break. The whole right or seaward side of the flume had opened out and the flood was pouring to the rocks below in a spreading forty-feet-high cataract. The ghastly smear along the top ran on unbroken, right out to the end of a loose plank, which was kicking spasmodically under the impulse of the released stream of water shooting under it. The Chief, pointing to a ragged fragment of bloody cuticle, wedged in a joint of the line of boards on which we were standing, delivered himself of what I believe was his only approximately correct diagnosis of any feature of the whole affair.

"The fact that piece of skin and toe-nail were torn off on this side of the flume directly opposite the bulge," he said, "would seem to indicate that the brake our man made of his right arm flung over the top plank of the other side must have finally brought him to a stop here. Then he must have doubled up crosswise of the flume, with his feet against the place where that skin is torn off and his back against the end of that plank that is sprung loose. When he straightened out that great rack of bone and muscle of his something had to give way, and it seems to have been the flume. Probably the force of the water, where his body deflected it against the side, was of some help; but it must have come jolly near to staving in his ribs where it drove into him at right angles."

"Perhaps it did," I said. "We can't tell till we find him." I was not anxious to hurry up the search by any means; but I felt that it would be better to move on to a place where I could grow dizzy without the risk of plunging forty feet onto a pile of broken rocks. The Chief, with ready consideration, hastened forward, and my faintness passed quickly when I felt the solid floor of the crushing level of the mill beneath my feet.

It appeared that they had knocked off early the previous evening for want of cane. At the time, the superintendent said, he thought the flume had been carried away by flood water. He had only evolved the bullock theory when he went out at daylight and found the blood and meat smeared along the planks. The bullock must have got wedged in finally, he thought, and the water had piled up behind it and sprung out the side. They had not found the carcass yet, but, as there was a very sharp slope down to an in-reaching neck of the cove, it was not impossible that the rush of water had rolled it right on into the sea. Neither Harpool nor myself thought it worth while to ask him if he had found any bullock's hair among the "meat."

Going down through the silent mill to reach a lower level before doubling back to the foot of the flume, a weird sort of sputtery peeping caught my ear while we were traversing the boiling-room. Something vaguely familiar in the sound caused me to trace it to its source behind one of the big vats. The virtuoso proved to be a lanky Australian sugar-boiler, whiling away the idle hour blowing across the holes in a queer little bamboo flute. One of the blacks had found it in the last run of the bagasse—the crushed cane—a while ago, he explained. Someone must have dropped it in the flume. Funny thing that it had been so slightly crushed in coming through the rollers. He gave it to me readily when I told him that I was a collector of primitive musical instruments. Said he had a much better one—made in Germany and all bound with brass—in his home in Maryborough. I took it on the off chance that I might some day be able to give it back to Ranga. I knew how greatly he was attached to it, and, since flutes like that were only made in one little pile-built village on the coast of Ambon, how hard a time he would have to replace it.

I played up the superintendent's "washed-into-the-sea" theory for the Chief's benefit as long as I could, but finally he circled round and hit the double trail of footprints that led down to the end of the old pier. The idea that Ranga had ridden the flume alone was so firmly rooted in his mind however, that he agreed at once with my suggestion that the smaller prints must have been made by an idle boy from the hung-up mill, who had perhaps trailed the blood on his own account, in the hope of getting the bullock meat. As I myself had made a point of keeping on the grass to the side of the path, my trail of the night was not discovered.

"The poor devil must have thrown himself over here and been finished by the sharks and 'gators," Harpool shouted up to me from where, at the foot of the steps of the old pier, he stood beside the black-filmed pool that had drained from Ranga's wounds as he steadied himself for a few moments before lurching over to the bow of the launch. The Chief also said something more about coming back with a boat next day and searching the beach for anything that might remain. I didn't follow him very closely, for, just at that moment, a trim clipper bow slid out past the end of the southern point. Knowing a certain old brass-cylindered spy-glass would be training landward from the bridge that followed, I opened and closed my arms swiftly in a surreptitious wave of farewell. Good old "Choppy" must have been standing very close to the whistle-cord, for his reply came instantly. The wind carried the toots that must have sprung from the heart of two woolly steam-puffs in the opposite direction, but I caught the message just the same. "All's well!" was what old "Choppy" signalled in answer to my wave. His "puff-puff" talk was a deal easier to understand than his English.

I was no longer in Australia when the Mambare returned from her maiden voyage to Singapore, so her skipper's report came to me in Paris by letter. He had put both of my friends ashore in Macassar, he said, safe, sound and comfortably heeled for "siller." He had become much attached to both of them in the course of the voyage, and couldn't thank me enough for putting him in the way of giving them a bit of a lift. He trusted I wouldn't fail to command him whenever another opportunity of the kind presented itself.

The night that I sent Rona and Ranga off from the pier of the old sugar mill in the Mambare's launch marked the beginning of one of the strangest and most picturesque friendships the Islands ever knew; picturesque in the striking background the strongest and most terribly-scarred man in the South Pacific made for the hauntingly appealing beauty of the most interesting woman, and strange—more than passing strange—in that there was none who could say that their relations were ever other than those of mistress and servant.